"We shouldn't censor ourselves on account of spambots. "
Sure, but there's a finite amount of time one has for tagging and deleting spam. The install of drupal on the site is quite old, and has limited spam protection, so this will be resolved once we migrate to a newer version.
"What problem is there with viewers showing appreciation?"
I didn't say there was. I was merely grouping together at a high level the types of comments left on the site. However as the site doesn't support OpenID, and doesn't use the same logon as Ubuntu Forums, launchpad, brainstorm or any other Ubuntu resource I _was_ reluctant to have a whole new user database just for people to say "Thanks". It seems overkill. Yes we should allow feedback and yes there should be more/better ways to communicate, and yes I believe people should be able to leave comments on videos, it's just that the implementation in the version of Drupal we had at the time wasn't great.
"A technical support disclaimer can direct people to the forums."
I agree to some degree. A link under each video saying 'Discuss this in the forums' which takes you to (for example) screencasts.ubuntuforums.org would be great. That way people could use their existing logons, and we can use the existing infrastructure. Would this mean in addition to or instead of comments on the site though?
"If we syndicate publicly created videos, there would be newly created content on a regular basis. Syndication would not rule out the production of quality videos, it would just broaden the content base."
There's already a means for people to get publicly syndicated videos via whatever their favourite video site is, whether it's Miro, google video, youtube, blip.tv, vimeo or whatever. There's no value-add for us if all we're doing is pulling in videos from elsewhere. Indeed this feature already exists and existed before screencasts.ubuntu.com in the form of www.ubuntuvideos.com which used to pick out videos and syndicate them. There is no point us just replicating that.
"The more we let people participate, the more they will participate."
That I agree with. How we do that, is another matter.
"The desire for control might be an underlying issue as to why the screencasts site has not taken off."
That's a very valid concern.
"The reason that the Ubuntu forums and wiki are so dang great is that they are egalitarian/community controlled. I realize that Drupal is a bit tricky to administrate, but roles can be created for varying levels of access/control right?"
I dont think the admin of drupal is the main issue. It's creating the screencasts, encoding them in nice formats and uploading them. I'm the only one who has ssh access to static.screencasts.ubuntu.com so I had to upload them there. I am the only admin on the drupal page so I could create the pages. However if others created videos I did that work. Fact is not many people created videos.
Yes, it's not optimal to have one person having access like that, and I'm happy to give other access to the drupal site (once we upgrade it) and also to request shell access to the backend server, but I can't action that because that's canonicals domain - it being a canonical hosted server.
"However, lets not limit the community's options based on the lack of specific features, people are what we need."
Sure, and suggestions for how to get people _making_ videos welcome.
"The more people we have participating, the less the burden will fall on one person."
To some degree yes, but also potentially the quality drops.
"Different workflows will have different time requirements and will produce varying quality, right? Here is a screencast of a guy explaining GTKRecord My Desktop:"
I'm not about to critique someone elses specific work, but there are issues which occur in _many_ screencasts. The first is that many are recorded at such a low resolution that it's impossible to read the text on the screen. Many also are encoded into formats which degrade the video further. In addition many screencasts are made on the users own machine which has all kinds of additional stuff enabled which a new and first time user will be unfamiliar with. The video you posted is a prime example of that. Loads of 3d effects causing a very distracting and non-familiar environment to be recorded.
In summary I want to revive the screencasts project, and want to ensure we maintain quality whilst we bring more people on board.